Another Michael, Brittle Brian, E.R. Visit, Keta Ester
House Show
Philadelphia
March 14, 2026
Nothing says “the textbook definition of a stacked bill” more than when I get to see not one, not two, but three local acts I’m excited about. For this show, that was E.R. Visit, Brittle Brian, and Another Michael. Philadelphia’s @ — the SEO-loathing duo of Stone Filipczak and Victoria Rose, both now calling Philly home after starting the band as a long-distance Baltimore-to-Philly text-message connection — grew rapidly out of the basement show scene on the strength of their songwriting and the incredible, mind-piercing blend of their harmonizing. Seeing them for the first time at a West Philly basement show in 2022, I was wrecked by the sound they made together, like seeing Avey Tare and Panda Bear if they’d wanted to be The Roches and somehow pulled it off. Since then, they’ve signed to the legendary 4AD and tend to play with additional musicians on bigger stages (though they’ll still perform as a duo, too) but what made this show particularly unmissable for me was the chance to see Filipczak’s and Rose’s solo ventures — E.R. Visit and Brittle Brian, respectively — each perform in such a small, modest space as a Brewerytown basement.
Brittle Brian was first, Rose singing and playing nylon string guitar. Trying out a handful of new songs, Rose mixed in tunes from 2022’s Biodiesel, like “Crow," a favorite of mine; the song’s a stunner, its wheeling, murmurating vowels – “AHHHHHhhooouuuuoooo” – charting out a truly first-rate rise-and-fall melody, one that hasn’t left my head since the show. Rose’s is a nimble voice, sometimes scruffy, sometimes pure, with an expressive, woodwind-ish tone that’s perfectly suited to her low-tuned Travis picking and shifty strumming, and vocally, she never settles for mere prettiness, often pushing her voice into wonderfully strange, highly-active territory, like the songs were written in the REM state. For all the classic folk-music qualities of her songs, both in Brittle Brian and @, I appreciate how firmly they’re rooted in the present and in the environment of the city, never mining nostalgia or empty pastoralism, whether it’s the way “Crow” seems to incidentally update an old displaced myth, or the song where she sang, in a low rasp: “dreaming of a living wage.”
E.R. Visit was Filipczak on guitar, flutes and singing, accompanied by Eli Dubois with expert touch on electric keyboard, and the pair conjured worlds: Filipczak’s heavily-tremolo’d, autotuned singing, ocarina with rippling digital delay, odd-metered minimalist fingerpicking patterns, octave-spanning keyboard ostinatos, and adventurous riffing and harmonizations. (Between songs, Filipczak had an amusing tendency to address the crowd with the VoiceTone pedal’s formant shift on, making him sound like one of those blurred-out anonymous witnesses you see in true crime docs.) The pair closed with a version of “Bracken Mountain Funeral Pyre," the over-7-minutes peak from last year’s LP my children will ignore you, my children will type amen, that stretched out and stopped time: a majestic, elegant composition, Filipczak’s gorgeous, pentatonic ocarina melodies recalling Gagaku music and the 16-bit video game music of my (mostly) adolescence. “I want you, only when I don’t want to,” he sang, the last word on the subject before long, marvelous instrumental passages took hold, this version far earthier and more engrossing than the album’s still-great rendition.
Another Michael – Michael Doherty on guitar and voice, Alyssa Resh on drums, Nick Sebastiano on bass, Jacob Crofoot on lead guitar – closed out the night. They’re friends and sometimes-collaborators of mine; I toured with them in 2024 and contributed to their last two LPs, Wishes To Fulfill and Pick Me Up, Turn Me Upside-Down, so don’t expect even the faintest hint of objectivity here. I love this band. Lead singer Michael Doherty has such an effortlessly sweet voice, hearing him sing is like watching Alysa Liu skate (I once heard him harmonize some complicated Usher tune on a car ride like it was no biggie, and I’ll never let him forget it) and he sounded as great as ever last night, whether on old favorites like “I Know You’re Wrong” and “New Music” or on new, unreleased gems like “Noticing Magenta," as fine a paean to the color – and to the blush of adoration – as you’re likely to ever hear.
